Databricks CEO on AI Pacing, Cyber Risk, and the Enterprise

As a business leader, there's a tragedy of the commons. If you wanna stop, if you wanna go slower, why don't you go slower? Like, I'm competing, I wanna win.

There's almost two camps. There's one camp which believes that this actually is an engineering problem, and there's others which actually believe you have to slow it down.

Humans don't respond fast enough to the attacks that are happening. You need to automate all of those, and most organizations are actually not close to doing that. Is RSI and recursive self-improvement that the labs are doing leading us there? That's the big question.

Something Elon said, this is some elaborate 4D chess because on the one hand you're saying all of humanity will die. On the other hand, you're saying, "Hey, what do you want for your IPO allocation?"

For the first time ever, a company at scale last week said that they're moving from the frontier models to GLM. Do you think that that's a trend or do you think that's just like a one-off anecdote?

Um...

AI may already be smart enough for the enterprise. The problem is that it doesn't understand your company. Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi joins a16z's Martin Casado and Sarah Wei to discuss what's actually holding back AI adoption and why the answer may have less to do with building smarter models and more to do with giving them the right context. They also debate the push to pace frontier AI, recursive self-improvement, and where the risks are real today. Ali argues that super intelligence remains far from what we currently see, while cybersecurity is an immediate problem as agents make attacks faster and harder for human security teams to keep up with. And they get into what Databricks has learned using AI internally, from building an organizational ontology to managing token costs and choosing different models for different jobs.

Thank you for being here, Ali.

Super excited.

So we obviously wanna get to Databricks, but there is a broader conversation going on right now about AI, and Dario's weighed in, Jakob's weighed in, Elon's weighed in. But we wanna hear what Ali Ghodsi thinks. In terms of, you know, if you called the topic broadly speaking, pacing the frontier, et cetera, um, what is your strongest agreement with what's being out there? Where do you disagree? And maybe where is there nuance that's not being captured?

Yeah. Ha- happy to cover it and me and Martin argue a lot, so, um-

[laughs] So-

I'm sure that's not gonna take long

We'll try and re-

Yeah

We'll try and rein it in this time.

Yeah. Try to stay calm. But, uh, well, I, I do think first and foremost that there, uh, maybe we agree on this, that, um, uh, leaders have responsibility to not freak people out unnecessarily unless there's a really, really good reason. And I think, you know, there's always different people in society that are at different places, you know, in their mind space. So, you know, talking about these kind of existential risks and, you know, uh, scenarios where all of humanity is gonna be wiped out, I think, uh, um, is ir- irresponsible. Uh, like it can tip a lot of people over, and it can cause-

Uh, un- un-

... a lot of like mental health issues.

Unless you have something that's gonna wipe